September 2008 Entries

How ironic!

After going on at length about how Google's competition is the victim of the search juggernaut's ability to make searching Google a habit, now they're running up against the same brick wall with the introduction of Chrome.

With the introduction of a new product that's vital to future strategies, one has to account for cognitive lock in and habitual behavior. Let's do a walk through of two examples.

Searching by habit

First of all, my Google analogy. Using Google as a search engine isn't a conscious choice, it's habit. We don't think about it, we just do it. And because we don't think about it, you can't take a rational approach to convincing us to do otherwise. You have to disrupt the playing out of the habitual script. And you can't just disrupt it once. You have to destroy the script completely and permanently.

So Microsoft's Cashback scheme was doomed to failure from the beginning. It was a rational appeal based on Microsoft's offering to pay you an incentive for using their search engine. It's a fundamental human appeal and, on paper, appears to make sense. The problem is, sense isn't really enough to change habits. Here's what will happen. Someone will hear about the Cashback offer and may actually rationally suspend habitual behavior in order to try Live Search. Their autopilot will be switched off and they'll consciously take over the controls. But we're programmed to revert to autopilot in order to save energy. So unless the experience offered such a tremendous benefit that it's worth our while to continue to rationally keep our hand on the controls, we'll turn our attention (remember, attention is a one task at a time proposition, so we have to be very judicious about where we choose to spend it) to other things and go back to autopilot behavior. Cashback would have to blow away our previous search experiences, giving us a benefit worthy of investing the time to create a new habit. Cashback simply didn't raise the bar enough.

What Goes Up will probably Come Down

So, with that psychological foundation, one could predict with a fair degree of confidence what would happen with the introduction of Cashback. There would be a temporary blip upwards in marketshare as the least loyal of Google's habitual users consciously decided to give it a try, and then because the experience wasn't a revolution in search, habitual behavior would take over and they would go back to Google. Marketshare would quickly return to previous levels. In fact, because there are a number of subtle psychological scripts built to help us maintain our habits (habits are a evolutionary advantage because they allow us to function with less cognitive effort) we might even become more frequent Google users and less frequent Live users. The bounceback could actually cause Live to lose marketshare.

Now, let's look at what actually happened. The early summer introduction of Cashback seemed to be the answer to Live's woes, as Compete's Jeremy Crane was quick to point out.  Marketshare took a quick jump upwards. But two months later, Cashback's initial glow is quickly fading. Search users are switching their auto pilots back on, and the default setting is Google.

Chrome Plated Strategies

Now, with the introduction of Chrome, Google is facing exactly the same challenge. They're calculating that Chrome will have what it takes to break the Explorer or Firefox habit. And exactly the same pattern is emerging, as people take Chrome for a spin to decide whether it's breaking-habit-worthy. And at this point, the answer seems to be no.

There's one potential difference here. Chrome is much more than a browser. Google has a shiny future planned for the web app interface. If they raise the bar enough, people may make the investment required to break their existing habit and reform a new one around Google's browser. But don't expect any big marketshare shifts until that bar is raised.

This Monday, I was doing a workshop keynote for the fine folks at Intuit (thanks for the invite again Olivier) and I mentioned that search is interesting to a student of human behavior because it's an online crystallization of a basic human need, the drive to find information. Similarly, email and online chat are crystallizations of the need to communicate. Because these things have been reduced to their essence, they make for interesting observation. In cleaning up my back log of blog posts (hey..in my case, maybe that's what BLOG stands for...Back Log), I go back to a column from the spring Search Insider Summit, where after three days of talking, we realized that search was part of everything, even though few of the conversations were explicitly about search. By the way, planning is currently underway for the Fall Summit in Park City, Utah. We'll be striving to keep the conversations rolling! - Gord

Great Summit — But What Will We Call It Next Time?

Posted May 22nd, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss

Less than 24 hours ago, my fellow columnists were sitting on a stage on Captiva Island, Fla., recapping the events of the three-day Search Insider Summit. It was Insider Aaron Goldman that first noticed the dilemma. “You know,” he mused, as he looked at his famous Summit Buzz Index list (more on this in Aaron’s next column), “I don’t see the word search in here.” We realized, together with the attendees, that in three days of earnest, thoughtful, engaged and even passionate discussion, we had talked about a lot of things: marketing, branding, conversations, engagement, intent, convergence, communities, mobile and local. But somehow, search remained implicitly rather than explicitly present in these conversations.

The Essentially Human Nature of Search

Perhaps we had outgrown search. But no, that wasn’t it. Search had outgrown us, or, at least, the box we kept trying to stuff it in. It went to something that I had touched on a few times over the past three days. Search isn’t a channel. Search is glue, search is ether, search is a synapse, a connection, a completion. Search is a fundamental human activity. Search isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s how we express ourselves.

Perhaps it’s the human need to categorize things. We tend to pigeonhole search and put labels on it. It’s direct response, it’s transactional, it’s pull rather than push. But search isn’t a noun, search is a verb. And it was only on the plane ride back that I started to realize how important that is.

Battelle’s Big Idea

John Battelle did a great job of poking at the import of this in his book “The Search.” But I’m not sure people realized how mind-boggling Battelle’s “database of intentions” is. It’s a vast concept, and that scares the hell out of most people. Similarly, Google’s goal to organize the world’s information can be as deep as you want to make it.  

Let’s dissect this a bit so we can start to put appropriate scope to it, and you’ll realize that Google’s goal is maybe the biggest, hairiest, most audacious corporate goal in history.

There are few things humans need on a daily basis. We are biomechanical machines, so we need oxygen, water, food and sleep. We are social creatures, so we need to communicate. And we are rational beings (or at least, we come equipped with the necessary equipment for rational thought) so we need information. Given that, organizing the world’s information sounds like a good thing, right? It makes our life easier. But whoever organizes the world’s information also controls access to it. We pass at their pleasure.

A Toll on Information

Recently I had the opportunity to cycle up the Rhine Valley in Germany. Dotted along the valley are dozens of castles overlooking the river. The castles exist because the Rhine was the primary navigation route of central Europe, and robber barons realized that if they could control even a small part of the river, they could exact tolls and become fabulously wealthy. But even as bold as the baron’s were, their plans pale in comparison to Google’s goal. Imagine the ability to impose a toll on every single bit of information that we, as humans, need on a daily basis.

In a remarkably short time, Google has created a connection to the biggest repository of information ever collected, and each day, the company adds to it. Each day, our ability to access the information we need to function relies more and more on search, which means it relies on Google.  For almost any decision we make, we need information. Sometimes, the information is at hand, but when it’s not, we have to search for it. And, we will take the easiest possible route to do so. That’s why for more and more of our actions and decisions, there are corresponding searches. Search is not a channel, it’s how we act on our intentions and aspirations.

Search Centered by Default

Gerry Bavaro, another Search Insider, said it best. If you truly put your prospect at the center of your marketing strategy, it can’t help but have search at the core. It’s a given. When your prospect reaches out for the information required to make a buying decision, it’s highly likely they’ll reach out through search.

So, as we tried to put the wraps on three days of high-level thinking about search, we realized we had actually unwrapped something bigger than any of us realized. I’m not sure what you call it, but one thing’s for sure. It won’t fit in any pigeonhole.

Cuil was introduced when I had other things on my mind, namely trying to jam 2 months of work into 2 weeks so I could take my family on a long vacation to Europe. So I didn't get a chance to caste my jaundiced eye on the much touted Google killer that has so resoundingly flopped since it's introduction. That's too bad, because I could have saved everyone a lot of time. I don't care how "cuil" the technology is in the background, from a search user perspective, Cuil is a disaster!

For the past several months, I've been writing on MediaPost and Search Engine Land about inherent human behaviors and how they play out on search. I've talked about the limits of working memory, information foraging theory, how we pick up scent, how we navigate the results page, how we respond to images versus text, how we've been conditioned to search by habit and how what we read on the results page connects with our unexpressed intent in our minds. Cuil fails miserably on all counts. It frustrates the hell out of me that people don't pay attention to the basic rules of human behavior. If the founders of Cuil had read our eye tracking reports, read Pirolli and Card's information foraging theory, read any of my posts or blogs or read any post by Bryan or Jeffrey Eisenberg or Jakob Nielsen, millions of dollars of VC funding, thousands of hours of development time and a lot of actual and virtual ink could have been saved. Unless Cuil completely revamps their interface, they're doomed to failure.

Cuil completely disregards the conditioned patterns we use to navigate results pages. This is a risk, but an acceptable one. You can change things up, but you better damn well deliver when you do. All Cuil delivers is confusion. It's almost impossible to pick up scent. The eye is dragged all over the page because there's no logical presentation. Functionality is ambiguous, not intuitive. The mix of images and text does nothing to establish relevance. Perceived relevance of the SERP is nil. If I would have looked at this a few months ago, I would have predicted that users would try it once because of the hype, been mildly intrigued by the look but found it almost unusable, quickly beating a path back to Google. I didn't need to do eye tracking. A quick glance at the results page was all I needed. Unfortunately, because my mind was on the French Alps rather than the latest Google killer, my first glance was 3 months delayed and my would-be brilliant prediction just sounds like "me-too" hindsight.

Ah well..

For others that have Google in their sights, a word of advice. Mix up the search business..shake the hell out of it. It's time. Come up with a better algorithm, blow up the results page and see where it lands, jolt the user out of their conditioned behavior. By all means, take millions in eager VC capital and reinvent the game. It's way past time. But please, don't ignore the fact that humans are humans and there will always be certain rules of thumb and strategies we operate by. You can destroy the paradigm, but you can't change generations of inherent behavior. Cuil never bothered to learn the rules. That's going to cost them.